http://midterm.votrubam2.sites.carleton.edu/cms/
Art is one of the columns of humanity. It is quite a unique experience to physically go to an art museum and take in the works. The different effects each piece has on you emotionally, the sheer talent presented by the artists, the unparalleled cultural aesthetic of it all; it is hard to beat that. However, it is not always possible to be able to physically go to a museum. You may not live near one, you may not have a way to get there. That is what drew me to the decorative art dataset from the Williams College Museum of Art.
My process with this data was decently easy. The data was already clean, so I did not have to clean up anything. I decided to make an Omeka exhibition, and that required me to come up with some sort of theme of the pieces I was going to exhibit. I downloaded the data to analyze it, but realized I did not have to do that much work with it. I decided to just choose ten American art pieces from the data (country of origin/creator was a piece of information included in the data set) and put them into an Omeka exhibition. In addition to the spreadsheet of the WCMA data, I also used the WCMA official website which has their collection digitized. I basically transferred the data I gained from both the spreadsheet and website into Omeka to create a more concise presentation of a specific genre of art (American).
As far as presentation goes, I kept the original and basic theme of Omeka for my exhibition. I made this creative decision because I felt the default theme presented the information and exhibition the clearest and the best. For this WordPress subdomain, I chose a theme that is based around the idea and concept of an art gallery. The theme felt fitting because of the art theme of the dataset I chose.
This project was very eye-opening. It is significant to put make things like this accessible to all. I mentioned in my opening paragraph how art is extremely important to humanity; it makes us human. Not everyone has access to art, however. By digitizing art’s metadata and putting it online with pictures, you are granting access to the art to anyone with Internet access. This is extremely important not only from an educational standpoint but also an enjoyment one. Art is fun, and it exists for people to view. Why not create something where the most people possible can view it?